


these tornadoes are for you

by orphan_account



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Aged-Up Character(s), Alternate Universe - Assassins & Hitmen, Alternate Universe - Spies & Secret Agents, Blood and Injury, Enemies to Lovers, Implied Sexual Content, M/M, Non-Graphic Violence, bitches do be horny tho., schemes and blood and gray morality all over the place, the worst set of communication issues this side of the atlantic, they're both in like early to mid-20s i think
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-03-30
Packaged: 2021-02-28 20:01:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,451
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23402653
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Renjun turns the corner to see Lee Jeno in front of the door to the room opposite his. He’s still got a switchblade in one hand and his room key in the other. There is no easy way to navigate this situation.
Relationships: Huang Ren Jun/Lee Jeno
Comments: 28
Kudos: 305





	these tornadoes are for you

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flowermoons](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flowermoons/gifts).



> in other news, the quarantine brainrot has become TERMINAL
> 
> aka, renjun is a disaster gay parading as a distinguished gay. aka, renjun is a hitman/assassin and jeno is a secret agent and they kind of hate each other but kind of don’t. suggestive eyebrow wiggling. aka, in shad’s words: _i told u to write horny adjacent spy fic and u have delivered._ aka, i have—once again—made TERRIBLE decisions. 
> 
> (MG EPILOGUE IS STILL ON ITS WAY. I HAVE A TERRIBLE TRACK RECORD BUT I ALWAYS DELIVER AT SOME POINT) 
> 
> shad is a terrible influence and i blame her for everything. also, credit where credit is due, i also hate gab. kaya on the other hand has never done anything wrong ever. many, _many_ creative liberties have been taken (i have never been to europe.) tw for blood making out and a lot of implied death. title from _a primer for the small, weird loves_ by richard siken

The gala, more than anything, is a punishment.

Renjun’s good at his job, likes it even—there’s something undeniably satisfying about the crack of a gunshot, the efficiency of poison. It’s easy to develop a god complex in his line of work—he’s fairly sure Kun is halfway there—but Renjun’s never enjoyed _killing,_ the feeling of life draining out of his hands. There’s a pleasant finality to it, another name to cross off, but whenever he tries to explain the difference, Jaemin just laughs and calls him anal-retentive.

At any rate, high society events have never agreed with him, and Taeyong knows that. Everything in life is a cost-benefit analysis, and mingling with trust fund kids cosseted in couture and crisp dollar bills and the dregs of the geriatric wealthy raises far more costs than the bracing exhilaration of a kill. He can tolerate small talk in modest, digestible amounts, and galas are a feast.

But Los Angeles was a disaster, messier than he had intended and, frankly, not his best work. Kun had yelled at him to his face, but Taeyong had merely smiled, a faintly knowing kind of look that suggested he update his will as soon as possible.

Against his better judgment, Renjun sought him out after receiving the assignment, exasperation submerging sensibility. “The hell is this?”

“Language,” he said without looking away from his monitor. “It’s an assignment. If I remember correctly, you’re meant to kill an elderly Viennese socialite. It’s not difficult.”

“I know that,” he said crossly. Despite five years in this job—in this _office,_ recruited straight out of high school with his first assignment during graduation—he felt a child’s petulance creep into his voice. “But this is an invitation to a _gala._ You know I hate those events, that I’m terrible at small talk.”

Finally, Taeyong glanced away, levelling a steady glare at him. “Then I suppose this will be a learning experience for you, won’t it?”

Like he was a _child,_ but he might’ve walked into that, looking back on it. It’s in the past, anyway—Jaemin took one look at his pout and decided to take them out for drinks. They might’ve been late the next day, but at least the hangover had taken the edge off his ache of his wounded ego.

For all Renjun’s adulation of the section of the handbook that prohibits partnership between employees, sometimes he does wish he had Jaemin around on assignments. He’s been here a little over half an hour, and if he has to congratulate another spoiled rich kid on a successful passion project, he might end up shooting himself well before he ever gets to his mark.

He smiles agreeably at his newest dance partner, twirls them and chats listlessly about the hors d’oeuvres and the cause of the event, something he vaguely remembers as being related to capuchin monkeys. Above all else, he’s furious that he’s being forced to dance with these twits, dusting off the two-day seminar on ballroom dancing Taeyong gave him before the job in Prague.

He scans the ballroom casually, meets the gaze of a young man idling by a glass table of refreshments, one slender finger brushed against cut crystal. His bowtie is loose around his neck, the first button of his starched white dress shirt undone and revealing tan skin. He grins at Renjun like he means it, dark eyes and dark hair that’s far too messy for high society. There’s a sharpness to him, and in the midst of rounded vowels and wind-chime laughs, Renjun wants to lean into it, cut himself on the edge just so he can taste the blood.

The grin widens, and Renjun looks away. He’s cute enough, but he’s here on work, and if he fucks up one more job, Taeyong’s going to give him desk duty and Jaemin will smugly snapchat him after assignments, and he’ll wilt like one of those exotic plants that only flourish in very specific environments. He leads his partner across the floor and ruminates briefly on the fact that he’s become somewhat dependent on murder.

And anyway, he can still fuck him later. The handbook never said anything about limitations _after_ the job is done.

So he turns his attention back to the work at hand, dances and talks and dances and talks until he feels like he’s vibrating from boredom. There’s a limit to the amount of times one can expound on the glories of goat cheese en croute, and he’s far, far surpassed it. The vial of poison is burning a hole through his jacket pocket, and for a moment, he thinks he can hear it whispering, _use me, use me, use me—_

Renjun splashes cold water on his face, ruining the last dregs of his makeup. He can’t be bothered to care, but he leans forward anyway, examines the lines of his face.

The bathroom door is only half shut, and from here, he can still hear the tinny bounce of yet another waltz. He stares back at himself, tries to find just one part of him that feels human, and gives up a little before the song ends. There’s no point; it’s a cost-benefit analysis.

He shuts the door properly, and pulls the silver case out of his jacket pocket. His hands should be shaking with anticipation, with proximity, but they aren’t—he’s a goddamn professional, and if they tremble every now and then, no one’s around to call him out on it.

Renjun pulls the jade ring off his finger, carefully unlatches the jewel façade to reveal the inner compartment and pours the poison inside. It’s thick, still and reflective as mercury. For some reason, the sight reminds him of staring into the mirror, one hand braced beside the surface as if afraid it might give.

He locks it and replaces it on his ring finger, ducks back into the ballroom just as a pop song blends into a minuet. Renjun wonders if he’d get in trouble for killing the DJ on the way back to headquarters.

His mark’s talking with another older woman by the granite columns that flank the west side of the ballroom, gesturing with her hands to explain something inaudible in the distance and inexplicable even once he gets close enough to discern the words. _Maybe I won’t have time to kill the DJ after all,_ he thinks, plastering on a charming smile and asking in German if he can have this dance.

The ladies coo at him appropriately, call him a sweet young man and a proper gentleman and he soaks it up while keeping a watchful eye on the rest of the ballroom. Nothing of significance, but something feels off, an idiosyncrasy that tickles at the very back of his brain.

Of course, his mark agrees with little resistance, and he leads her out onto the dance floor. Before long, the steps of the dance are little more than an afterthought, and he tunes out the sound of her talking about her grandchildren studying in the States in favor of trying to remember Taeil’s instructions on how to properly use the poison ring. Two twists right, one twist left, best against prominent arteries.

Renjun makes it halfway through the second twist right before he’s interrupted.

There’s a murmured apology from beside him, something saccharine about stealing her dance partner, and his mark responds in kind, yielding quickly. “Oh, you two look so nice together. You remind me of my grandson and his boyfriend, he sends me pictures all the time—”

The poison ring burns on his finger as he’s spun away, away. He feels the loss of the kill like an ache, cutting deeper than bone. He’s already halfway to the poison—he may as well kill his new dance partner and find the little old lady later, finish her with a clean shot to the back of the head. The gears roll and click in his head, and his partner tilts his head up with one hand, rough, callused fingers on his chin.

Dark hair, dark eyes. Renjun can’t even muster the energy to be surprised. His voice is low, sweet, and he’s speaking Portuguese. “You left the bathroom smelling like cyanide. Terrible odor. Could’ve had the decency to use air freshener.”

“You stole my kill,” Renjun says, bitterly aware his cover’s entirely blown at this point. He’s not whining, because he’s a _goddamn professional._

“Yes,” he replies, easily leading them across the floor, further and further from his mark. “That was kind of the point. Murder is best avoided. Though I’m guessing you disagree on principle.”

“I’m going to kill you.”

“You can try.” He grins again, sharper than before, and more than anything, Renjun mourns the fact that his dramatic reveal as one of the Good Guys means Renjun won’t be able to sleep with him. Also, Taeyong’s going to kill him, but, well. Priorities.

He leans in close, breath warm against the shell of his ear. Faintly, Renjun registers the smell of champagne. “But I’ve been dealing with assholes like you for a long, long time, and I can’t promise you’ll succeed. Hell, maybe I’ll try and make it easy for you, since you’re pretty.”

Renjun raises his eyebrows so he doesn’t have to think about the heat in his skin, the tense closeness of him in the glassy sea of the ballroom. “I could deal with you in my sleep.”

The bravado doesn’t deter his partner in the slightest. “You were using _cyanide_ at a gala. You’re a rookie if I ever saw one.”

“I don’t like parties,” he informs him, wresting back the lead and pulling him across the dance floor.

His mouth twists into something crooked and dangerous. “Then what do you like?”

Renjun glances up at him sharply, schools his features into acid and spite. His bones are _vibrating_ inside him. “Killing. Murder, like you put it. Doing my _work,_ which you so rudely denied me the chance to accomplish.”

“She has a family, you know.”

“Not my problem.” His partner’s eyes narrow, and Renjun spins him once, watches with curiosity at the shift in his expression. “Does this _bother_ you? Death, and all.”

“’Death, and all,’” he parrots back drily, but there’s tension under it. “Of course it fucking bothers me. _Killing innocents_ bothers me, as it should bother _everyone._ This isn’t a fucking video game.”

“So you’re a moral sort.” They dance silently under the oppressive press of another waltz, and Renjun takes a moment to fit this into his perception of his partner. “Joined up because you wanted to fight bad guys? Rescue cats in trees?”

“Yeah, pretty much,” he twirls him lazily, taking the lead again. “Call it a childhood fantasy. I’ve always wanted to save the innocents of the world from evildoers.”

“Evildoers,” Renjun repeats, feels the heft of the word in his mouth. More puerile than the average insult towards him, and strangely endearing. “Like me.”

“Like you,” he agrees, and they both turn to glance over at Renjun’s mark, who’s rejoined her friend by the columns. The poison ring feels cold and heavy on his hand. Taeil’s going to _kill_ him. He’s going to kill him, and then resurrect him so Kun and Taeyong can kill him again. The mystery partner winks at him before clasping his hand and deftly pulling the ring off. “And honestly, I think I’m doing a reasonably good job.”

Renjun watches him slip the ring into his pocket. He watches him, and dances with him, and _doesn’t do anything._ He’s going to get his license revoked at this rate. Finally, he forces himself to look up. “You do know I could just kill her later. In the car. At her house. On the street. It wouldn’t be hard.”

His mouth thins, presumably because Renjun’s coarse language offends his delicate moral sensibilities. He’s past caring. “You won’t, though.”

“Oh?” Renjun holds his gaze as he spins him, refuses to look away. It feels like an Olympic sport, feels like biting through his tongue and tasting blood fill his mouth. It feels like danger, and to someone who is infuriatingly used to being the most dangerous thing in a room, it also feels a little like delight. “And why is that?”

“Because I’ll stop you.” Renjun arches one eyebrow in disbelief—even he has to realize how trite this sounds. Renjun appreciates the parallels and the tropes, but really, less is more, and it’s not as if he’s really his handsome dance partner’s supervillain archnemesis. He just laughs, and tilts his head in consideration. “She’s an important woman—her family cares a lot about her wellbeing, so does the Austrian government. I respect your work ethic in a professional capacity, but you’re not killing her tonight.”

“Tomorrow, though,” he replies, the words racing past his impulse control. “I can kill her tomorrow.”

And despite everything, his mouth quirks up in something that could be possibly be a smile, if it settled down long enough to blunt its edges.

“You can try,” he says, and for the first time, Renjun feels like he means it. 

++

He plans to—or at the very least, considers the option deeply—but when he debriefs with Taeyong that night, he’s immediately shut down. There’s less anger and more disappointment in his voice when he orders him to return to HQ, which makes the entire ordeal that much more painful.

(When he gets back, he treks down to the surveillance rooms, throws a poor maintenance tech out of a chair and scours the databases until he gets a name.

 _Lee Jeno,_ he thinks, as he erases the search and apologizes to the dazed twenty something on the floor. He says the name aloud once, twice, as he ascends to the training gyms.

Renjun wants to break his nose.)

++

Renjun doesn’t get his license revoked, but it’s a close thing. He’s screamed at, and reprimanded, and shown a remarkably organized slideshow on the consequences of a sloppy job, but in the end, he makes it out with a slap on the wrist and what Taeyong assures him is a temporary demotion.

For months after that, they have him on object extraction. It’s easier, still offers up the clean satisfaction of a job well done, and Renjun surprisingly enough doesn’t spend all his free time pining for his next kill. He uses it effectively, on weapons practice and pretending that the paper outline of the target has dark hair and a Cheshire smile.

Jaemin catches on a few weeks after Vienna—Renjun isn’t entirely sure how at first, since he never explained the details of how the job went south.

He finds him in the gun range, waits patiently until Renjun notes the eerie lines of a silhouette and twists to slam him into the wall. Stepping out of his reach, he raises his eyebrows and already, Renjun feels unfairly judged. “Lee Jeno?”

Renjun turns back to the target, a familiar burn flickering to life. “You know him?”

“I’ve heard things.” Jaemin hums, leans against the divider. “Seen him in your report, in others. He’s good.”

He fires twice, something like fury or desire or satisfaction searing through him as he watches them puncture the target’s forehead. “Not good enough.”

But despite the sharp pull of his anticipation, Renjun doesn’t see him again for what feels like a lifetime, and when he does, it’s nothing planned. It catches him off guard, unsteadies him dangerously, and it’s only afterward that he regains the presence of mind to realize he’s made terrible decisions.

Wryly, he figures this seems to be the pattern with Jeno.

Kun sends him to pick up a musty old vase hidden in a fortress of mansion out a little south of Naples. The security’s standard, nothing he’ll have much difficulty getting past, but the estate itself is huge, and that complicates things. There’s layers to it, fucking _layers._

Renjun makes it past the entrance and through the labyrinthine hallways without resistance. Even after he catches sight of a patrolling guard in the wing set aside for priceless antiquities—because that’s a thing rich people have now, apparently—it only takes a second for him to duck into the cool darkness of a nearby alcove and wait for them to pass.

His rage is a venomous, uncaring thing; carved violence, each sharp tooth cut assiduously until the barest touch could draw blood. Renjun’s spent a lot of time learning the necessary patience, training his anger to kneel at his feet like a cowed animal, but for all his efforts, sometimes his control slips.

He misses killing, he’ll admit that—he misses it with the soft wistfulness of an old friend, the familiar stomach-drop bite of watching a body hit the floor. But God if he doesn’t love fucking with rich people even more.

Renjun leans into training, passes through the rest of the corridor unseen and rappels up the stairwell while fighting the slowly growing urge to simply fuck protocol and shoot the next starched-collar, coiffed hair asshole he sees, damn the consequences.

Strangely enough, the voice of reason isn’t Kun or Taeyong telling him not to make a mess of things for the higher-ups, or even Jaemin snarking about using pigeons for target practice before graduating up to humans. He turns the corner into a narrow hallway that leads up to heavy steel doors, and remembers Jeno’s stiff, furious Portuguese. _This isn’t a fucking video game._

But it is, isn’t it? In the grand scheme of things. Sure, there’s no pause button, no save points, no dubiously named boss villains. But there’s overlap everywhere, in the heft of his gun, the cloying vacuousness of the title “evildoers”, in the insidious realization that life is only what individuals make of it, and he will never be anything more than what he’s made of himself.

 _Cost-benefit analysis,_ he thinks, disabling the alarms and slipping through into a dizzying circular chamber. It’s always been too much work to push back against human nature, a losing fight from the start.

There’s a soft noise of confusion from inside, and then a hand on his throat, slamming him back against the door so it shuts fully. The sound of it echoes and echoes, and Jeno pins him to the steel with the point of his elbow.

Recognition blooms behind his eyes. “You.”

“Me,” Renjun agrees, wrenching Jeno’s arm behind his back and shoving him into the door.

“Nice seeing you again,” Jeno gasps against the metal, throwing an elbow back and catching him across the shoulder. His grin is bloody and feline and Renjun traces the line of it with his eyes. “You look well.”

“Do I?” he asks, and it comes out absent, offhanded, as he lunges forward with a serrated knife dangling from his left hand. Jeno dances back fluidly, _elegantly,_ and if Renjun didn’t hate him so much, he’d still be hung up over never getting to sleep with him. As it is, he allows himself a mournful pang, and snaps his wrist like a weapon.

It shears off a lock of Jeno’s hair, and he has the decency to look properly surprised by it before tilting his head and grinning. “Why are you here, anyway? You’re a hitman, right? Where’s the blood and gore in stealing little old antiquities?” His smile turns crooked, bright and saccharine. “Or maybe this isn’t your choice, after all. Maybe you got demoted.”

Renjun’s control slips, and for a moment, he sees red. He blows past the vase in the center of the room, displayed simply on a granite plinth, and punches Jeno in the face.

The resounding crack might be the sweetest sound Renjun’s ever heard. Dark blood drips down his nose, slips over his lips and down the column of his throat, and all he can think of is how it matches the ink black of his hair. Almost involuntarily, Renjun raises one hand, fingers trembling and curled—

 _And for what?_ he thinks, stilling them in a jagged, harsh movement. He still isn’t sure what he meant to do. Smear the syrupy, venous trickle of it. Dip a finger in it carefully, bring it back to his lips. Crush his windpipe.

(For a moment, Renjun holds his hand still in the air between them and thinks of kissing him—of gripping his jaw so forcefully it would leave bruises, the only calling card either of them have ever known, and opening his lips against Jeno’s until the vase was an afterthought, until he could taste his blood for days.)

Oh, _fuck._

He drops his hand to his side quickly enough, but not before he sees Jeno’s lips part slightly, a brief, unconscious movement that he almost doesn’t catch. _Jesus fucking Christ._

 _Why is he even here anymore?_ Right, the vase. The vase sitting in the middle of the fucking room, untouched and unguarded, while Renjun eyefucks Jeno as he bleeds out of his fucking nose.

Except—except, this isn’t a total loss, not really. It doesn’t have to be one. He doesn’t have to go back to headquarters and listen to Jaemin’s quicksilver jokes about waiting until _after_ the job, or receive yet another demotion. He can _win_ , if he plays his cards right. 

So he leans into the burn of his anger and everything that comes with it, and draws his hand back up, traces blood across Jeno’s jaw until he’s leaving a sticky red handprint against his cheekbones. And then he bends towards him, steadying Jeno against him with his other hand braced on the back of his neck, and he kisses him and kisses him and _kisses him._

It’s terrifying. It’s glorious. It’s the worst decision Renjun’s ever made up to and including deciding to becoming a professional hitman, and he wishes he could regret it. He wishes he had the fucking capacity to care, to pull himself back from the brink like this isn’t walking into the center of the fucking tornado.

And then, miracle of all miracles, Jeno kisses him back.

He’s more desperate than Renjun had expected, open-mouthed and obscene, and honestly, Renjun never stood a chance. His hand on the back of Jeno’s neck lazily moves upwards, threads through dark hair made darker by sweat and blood and tugs, just a little. Jeno makes a soft, choked-off noise, pupils blown wide, and leans into him like it’s a foregone conclusion.

 _Except it’s not,_ Renjun thinks, and bites down on Jeno’s bottom lip, just hard enough to draw blood. He tastes it before pulling back, thinks about how this is the only kind of goodbye they’ll get, thinks about how he doesn’t hate it so much.

But Jeno’s a hero, and Renjun’s an evildoer, and it doesn’t really matter that both of them have blood on their hands and blood in their mouths, because there’s only one way this story ends. Winner takes all.

Jeno’s staring at him, lips still parted, gaze unfocused and hazy. His hands are curled against the smooth marble of the wall, and his tongue darts out to lick at the blood on his lips.

“Now we’re even,” Renjun rasps, voice ragged and torn. He cocks his head to the side, grins because he feels like he has to, and it comes out so sharp he thinks it might cut them both again. Jeno just keeps staring, the dark pools of his eyes lit like oil, like fire. It looks a little like hatred, like—Renjun doesn’t know what it looks like.

He steps back, even though every cell in his body is deeply, expressively against the mere idea of it. The black velvet bag he’d prepared for the extraction is already in his hand, drawstrings pulled apart. He places the vase carefully inside, and Jeno just fucking watches him do it.

There’s nothing of resignation in his eyes, but all the same, Renjun can recognize surrender when he sees it. Jeno’s gaze burns against him, and Renjun turns to leave, shuts the door behind him before slipping out of the estate.

Even after he’s washed himself clean, tilted the dregs of his crinkled plastic water bottle against his skin and scrubbed away what remains, he still thinks he can feel it. Even after three drinks and a Valium, he still tastes blood.

++

Taeyong reinstates him when he gets back. Renjun leaves Jeno out of his report, deleting large swathes before he finally submits it.

He tells himself it’s because it’s superfluous—because what matters are the details of the assignment: him getting in, and him getting out. Jeno was an accident, a liability, a mistake, nothing more than a blip on the radar. Renjun wishes forgetting him was easy as excising his name from the report.

He wonders, once, if he’s on Jeno’s report.

But in the end, nothing changes. Taeil smiles at him the next time he swings by Operational Tech, hands him a few more fancy gadgets and a knife with a slit up one side, hollowed out for poison. Renjun thanks him and hides the knife in his mattress.

It doesn’t take a lot of time for him to get back into the rhythm of things—there’s a familiarity to death, and he leans into it. When Renjun shoots a haggard, cornered businessman in Amsterdam—two shots to the back of the head, execution style—it feels right. _Muscle memory,_ he thinks, on the way back to the hotel he’s staying at, a revoltingly opulent, sleek number that straddles the Amstel. _Just like riding a bicycle._

He’s tired. It’s a sudden realization, a strange one—he’s never hated his job, never even resented it. It’s not like there was anything left for him to leave behind. Kun found him bloody and scraped out in an alley behind the neighborhood bar, three dead men slumped against brick façades around him, and didn’t even blink. He simply leaned down, held out a stark monochrome business card and a hand to help him up.

“You’ve got guts,” he said, the first and last compliment he’d ever given Renjun. He squeezed Renjun’s hand until his knuckles bled and bled, but didn’t let go. “And anger. Anger’s important in our line of work—hold onto it.” 

And he did; he held onto it so tight it slipped between his ribs and fashioned itself into a heart, and even if it hurts, it’s worth it to feel something _beat_ inside him, to feel alive for once in his goddamn life.

But right now, he can’t help but notice the cold emptiness of this life, the way, at the end of the day, it’s him killing alone, sleeping alone, _always_ alone. There’s nothing left to burn, no neck left to snap, nothing but pay per view television and drinks from the minibar.

Renjun digs old blood out from under his fingernails with a switchblade and watches the elevator ascend. It flakes in the air like maroon snow, and the elevator doors reluctantly slide open.

He registers the far-off noise of tinny conversation after stepping out—someone speaking on their phone. It grows louder, revealing shreds of words and the dulcet swing of a familiar voice. “Yeah, Hyuck, I know. I’m being responsible—taking my vitamins, doing my reports, getting the job done. _No,_ I haven’t seen him. I’m on information acquisition! Why on _earth_ would he be involved in—”

Renjun turns the corner to see Lee Jeno in front of the door to the room opposite his. He’s still got a switchblade in one hand and his room key in the other. There is no easy way to navigate this situation.

Jeno glances up and catches his eye. He makes a low, strangled noise in the back of his throat, a mangled version of what Renjun assumes is a swear word. “Hyuck, I’ll have to call you back.”

He ends the call, slips his phone into a dove gray suit jacket folded over one arm. Renjun takes the moment to take him in, draws his gaze across him with a hunger he doesn’t care to examine.

 _He needs a haircut,_ Renjun thinks. His hair’s grown out a little more, and it curls pleasantly over his ears. He’s got studs in both ears and a helix in his right, and he tugs at the shell of the cartilage with one hand, a nervous tick. He’s tanner, too, like he’s spent time in Barbados or Tahiti, or wherever they send secret agents in that organization of his.

There’s a scar on his jaw, running over the seam of the jawbone and dipping down onto his neck. Renjun’s eyes linger on it briefly, and then Jeno’s eyes are back on his, and he walks briskly up to the door to his own room only to lean against it casually.

He doesn’t want to go in, not yet. He doesn’t know what he wants, doesn’t think he even knows himself very well anymore.

“Information acquisition?” he asks, because he has to say _something._ The silence between them is a palpable thing, equipped with talons and an unsettling appetite. Renjun doesn’t want to give himself up to it.

Jeno cracks a faint grin. Renjun doesn’t pull away from the door slightly, doesn’t lean towards him like a sunflower stretching towards the light, because he’s an adult. “The boring part of my job, yeah.”

“Like rescuing cats from trees, compared to the rest.” He doesn’t even know why he’s still talking, why he’s still _here._ “Everyday heroism, something nice here and there for the plebeians.”

“Rescuing cats is much more important than information acquisition,” he says, a faint glint in his eyes. “I _like_ cats.”

It’s the first real piece of information he’s learned about Jeno, and he wraps it up and holds it close, as if it’s a present. As if it’s a purposeful, colorfully wrapped gift and not cannily slipped into banter they _really_ aren’t supposed to be having. The light in his eyes dims slightly, and he asks, “I’m guessing you’re here on work too. Kill any sweet old grandmothers this time?”

Renjun ignores the caustic bite in his voice. “Not precisely the words I would use to describe a balding, jaundiced divorcee balls deep in money laundering, but whatever floats your boat.”

“Doesn’t mean he deserved to die,” Jeno says quietly, and the words settle coldly behind his sternum.

Right. Heroes, evildoers, thwarted plans. Blood in his mouth, dripping onto his chin. He remembers this game, knows the rhythm of it, knows it’s inexorable and not worth the effort. Just because Jeno makes him feel _something_ doesn’t mean that that something is _good._ It doesn’t mean it’s _safe._

(He’s so tired of safety, of cutting off loose ends so they don’t come back to bite and changing his eye color with colored contacts every six months. _He’s so fucking tired.)_

Renjun slips the switchblade back into his bag, turns to press the key card to his door. “Someone wanted him dead, and now he is. The moral grounds for or against it never came into the picture. They usually don’t, in the real world.”

He can’t keep the bitterness out of his voice; he turns to gauge Jeno’s reaction but he’s leaned forward, pressing his forehead against the pale marble of the doorframe. His hair hangs over his eyes, obscuring his expression, but there’s something defeated in the line of his shoulders, a palpable fatigue, and Renjun thinks, _God, I know._

“Do you,” he starts, pulls back from the doorknob. This is treason, this is—this is stupid. This is just plain _stupid._ “Do you want to come in?”

Jeno pulls up his head, unsmiling but faintly grateful all the same, and Renjun feels a quiet fire flicker to life somewhere deep inside him, curled up right next to his forged heart. He presses the key card to the doorknob, steps inside and to the side, and Jeno carefully pads inside.

Renjun strips his jacket off, hangs it over a plush chair by the minibar. The room service menu hangs alluringly over the edge of the television stand, and he picks it up, peruses through it for a few seconds. He absorbs absolutely nothing.

Out of the corner of his eye, he watches Jeno drape his own jacket over the side of the matching chair and throw himself into it, loosing a long suffering sigh. He undoes the first three buttons on his collared white shirt, pushes his sleeves until they’re rumpled at his elbows and Renjun no longer has the mental bandwidth to process anything else.

He cracks open an eyelid, and Renjun throws the menu at him so he doesn’t have to make eye contact. Jeno examines it seriously, and Renjun takes the time to make himself a drink. The whiskey burns down his throat, and Jeno orders for two in mild tones, and he can feel a knot inside him start to slowly uncoil.

When he opens his eyes, Jeno’s staring at him, evaluative. Like he’s a puzzle he can’t quite crack. Renjun wants to smooth out the furrow between his eyebrows, tell him he’s never been that complicated. “Why don’t you like parties?”

 _Is this we’re doing now?_ he thinks vaguely, but can’t bring himself to challenge him. “Too much small talk. Too much—I don’t know. Schmoozing with the affluent, drinking champagne out of crystal and gold like it’s a fucking joke. It pisses me off. The kills aren’t worth it.”

Jeno mouths the words ‘ _worth it’_ like they’re foreign. His gaze is dark and contemplative for a few moments. Wordlessly, he rises to his feet, pours vodka into a shot glass and tosses it back. Renjun’s eyes trace the line of his throat as he swallows, and he asks, “Have you ever killed someone?”

His ministrations cease, stutter from moment to moment. Then he pours himself another drink and downs it, turns to face him so that he’s braced against the polished wood of the television stand. The dim lamplight limns the sharp planes of his face until it’s all light and shadow, angelic and unforgiving all at once. “Once.” His lips part, uncertain, and Renjun waits. He returns to his chair, passing one hand over his face as if exhausted.

“It wasn’t on purpose,” he starts, and Renjun’s mouth twists against his will. As if that was a question. As if he would ever kill like Renjun, for the sharp bite of it, as if he would tolerate it in the name of duty and the greater good. It could only have ever been an accident.

“We were—it was a big job. Taking down an international crime syndicate. The leader tried to slip away, under the cover of the shootout, and all. I… I was aiming for his arm.” He lifts one shoulder in a loose, faintly tipsy shrug. “By the time I got to him, he was already dead. Bled out of his shoulder.”

Renjun nods, satisfied, and reaches to pour himself another drink. He glances over, arches an eyebrow while he waits for Jeno to ask his question.

Eventually, he does. “Why did you kiss me?”

Renjun’s head snaps up, a tell if he ever saw one. Humiliation slips down his throat, a burn just as potent as the whiskey.

There are a limited amount of ways to answer this question, and the majority of those ways involve actively antagonizing Jeno. As much as Renjun wants to lie to him, wants to watch his eyes narrow like they had in the circular chamber, bones taut with fury and lust, he also doesn’t. He’s never seen Jeno surprised before, and figures this is as good a time as any.

“Because I wanted to,” he replies. Jeno blinks once, draws his gaze across his face like sandpaper, like he’s never _really_ seen him before. Renjun places the empty whiskey glass carefully on the dark steel table between them and swallows a smirk. “My turn.”

Renjun pulls himself off the too-soft plushness of the chair, sits back down on the other edge of the dark table. Their knees are just barely touching, and he leans forward so that he’s effectively bracketing Jeno, one hand on each arm of the chair. Jeno’s hands are pooled in his lap, head tilted to the side in an expression that lingers somewhere between curiosity and discomfort.

It’s a claustrophobic position for a secret agent, he’s sure. The kind of intimacy that, to them, just tastes of terror and the clean steel of a newly washed blade. The kind of intimacy that gets people killed.

“You’re a secret agent,” he says. “So why were you doing security? Why were you guarding that vase?”

Jeno grins, and it’s Vienna all over again, one hand clasped in his as they moved across a dancefloor that would never be theirs, a bowtie hung around his neck like a medal, like a promise. “I wasn’t on security; I was on object extraction. I was stealing it.”

Renjun makes a wordless noise in the back of his throat and pulls himself forward so that he’s straddling Jeno. He’s trembling slightly when he reaches down to kiss him, but Jeno arches up into it, twists his fingers into the collar of his shirt and pulls him down so forcefully Renjun thinks he might taste blood again.

He tightens the hand entwined in Jeno’s hair, kisses across his cheek until he finds the scar cutting across his jawbone. His head falls back, a nearly involuntary movement, as Renjun mouths at the skin around it. Jeno whispers something unintelligible and shaky in a language he’s never heard, and Renjun soaks in the sound, takes the moment presented to bite down hard enough that his last word pitches upward into a choked-off groan.

“Fuck,” Jeno whispers, loud enough that Renjun glances up at him. _“Fuck.”_

All at once, Renjun realizes he’s never told him his name—that he plucked Jeno’s out of the company database, drunk on fury and suppressed lust.

A small part of him wonders, _Should you really give him your real name?_ But it’s too late for that, he knows. Jeno could ruin his career with one backwards glance, could have him ruin his _own_ career—the name game isn’t even part of the fucking picture anymore.

He draws back, wipes his mouth, tries to even his voice. It doesn’t work. “My name’s Renjun—”

“I know,” Jeno says, more irritated than Renjun thinks he has any right to be. He cocks his head to the side, kiss-swollen lips twisting into a smirk, and _God,_ Renjun wishes he could regret this. “I know your name. Now shut up and kiss me until I forget it.”

“I hate you,” Renjun breathes, cupping Jeno’s face with both hands. His thumbs are going to leave bruises, and he registers the information belatedly, filing it away into some dusty corner of his brain. “I hate you so much.”

“Yeah,” he says, pulling him into another kiss, fingers still knotted around the cotton of his collar. His mouth opens under Renjun and he kisses endlessly, lazily, shaping soft words against the corner of his mouth. “I know.”

Renjun doesn’t know how much passes like that, lost in a haze of poor decisions and barely restrained want, kissing Jeno until his lips feel numb. Eventually, his hands drop from Jeno’s face, tracing down his arms and body. The thin fabric of his suit shirt has begun to stick to his skin with sweat, and it hides little to nothing when Renjun smooths it down. Jeno makes an odd, low sound and arches into the touch, which is about the time that there’s a knock at the door and a sing-song voice soon after. “Room service!”

“You’ve got to be fucking kidding me,” Renjun mutters and pulls away. One of Jeno’s hands thoughtlessly follows, tracing up to his elbow, but his expression’s clear, if a little frustrated. They meet each other’s gaze, and Jeno reluctantly gets up, moves further into the room so he’s not visible from the door.

Renjun runs a hand through his hair, closes his eyes to center himself. He clears his throat before going to open the door.

A young woman with the hotel’s insignia embroidered on her uniform rolls a cart in with one hand. She’s carrying another platter with her other hand, and it’s clear from her expression that yes, she _has_ noted the flush in his cheeks, and no, she _isn’t_ paid enough for this to be anywhere near her problem.

“Do I have to pay out of pocket?” he asks.

“It’ll get charged on your account,” she informs him in a heavy Dutch accent. “Thank you for your continued patronage. Complimentary condoms are in the second drawer of the nightstand, please take care not to dirty the sheets.”

Renjun shuts the door a little too hard.

He exhales slowly, turns to find Jeno crowding him back into the door like it’s his fucking job. The covered cart of food has already been rolled all the way into the center of the room, and Renjun can’t muster the necessary anger to pick a fight about that when Jeno’s lips are on his throat.

“Jeno,” he finally manages, curling his fists into the doorway. “ _Food._ It’s going to get _cold.”_

He glances up from where he’s undone half of Renjun’s buttons and is slowly working his way down his chest, looks at him like he’s crazy. “ _Fuck_ the food. We can eat later.”

And, let it be known, Renjun doesn’t go down without a fight. He protests all the way from the door to the bed, rambles about how cold pizza is a thing and so is cold breakfast food but no one—no one!—in the history of the world has ever craved cold _steak,_ and explains to Jeno very carefully and very slowly how they are going to regret this. And then Jeno kisses him again, and doesn’t let go, and Renjun decides that maybe the food can wait, after all.

++

(They wake up late the next morning, Jeno pushing himself up off of the pillow with one elbow so that sunlight filters through the gaps in the imperfect canopy of his body. He’s smiling, and it makes Renjun’s heart clench in a strange and terrible way. It’s like indigestion.

“That was nice,” he says, like they played fucking mahjong instead of—Renjun refuses to actively think about it. “We should do it again sometime soon.”

Renjun wants to punch him. He also wants to kiss him. These are both incredibly valid desires, and they coexist within him naturally. He settles for throwing his pillow at him and smirking at the way it makes Jeno screw up his face on impact. “Get out of my bed, Lee.”

In the end, they trade numbers. Burner phones, obviously.)

++

Sleeping with the enemy is an inherently dangerous pastime. It’s not even in the handbook—it’s a taboo that Renjun assumes is so widely known that there’s no reason to even put it in text. Fuck one of the good guys, and you get a bullet in the head.

It’s nothing to be taken lightly. Renjun diagrams the overlap in their assignments on scraps of butcher paper, and Jeno replies with increasingly ridiculous emoticons, because he has never taken anything seriously in his entire life, except, perhaps, the pursuit of justice.

Maybe not even that, if he’s willing to sleep with Renjun.

He doesn’t think about it too deeply; he doesn’t have the time, or the mental processing capacity to spend time thinking about how Jeno perceives him without large amounts of caffeine or a gun in his hand. Sometimes, between assignments, he’ll allow himself a few seconds to fully realize that he’s essentially crippling the rest of his career. It’s the sort of pleasant extracurricular activity that usually results in him getting blackout drunk.

Jeno doesn’t give a shit. Jeno jumps Renjun two blocks away from a mark, blood splattered on the shirt he’s wearing under his overcoat and a little smudged on his jaw, grits his teeth against the moral quandary of it all and kisses him like they’re in a movie, like they’ve somehow slipped into a universe where every bad decision they’ve made has somehow been absolved.

“This is just like in Romeo and Juliet,” he tells Renjun once, clad in a fuzzy complimentary bathrobe. He’s curled up in bed, sipping chocolate milk with a curly straw meditatively, and Renjun is both horrified that they’re in a relationship and oddly endeared by it. He thinks he might need to get a CT scan. “Forbidden love, and all that.”

Renjun glares at him from the futon. He’s got a flight out to London in an hour and a half—he doesn’t have the time to humor him. Buttoning up his shirt with one hand, he uses the other to gesture. Maybe Jeno _is_ rubbing off on him. “Romeo and Juliet were star-crossed lovers driven to tragedy by their family feud. We’re—we’re just idiots.”

“You wound me so carelessly,” Jeno says with mock-offense, setting his milk down on the side table. His expression’s too sharp for it to be safe. “And I’d like to think we’re smarter than them.”

Renjun arches an eyebrow. “Are we?”

“Yeah,” he says, crawling across mussed sheets so that he’s at eye-level if Renjun turns to meet him. He does, because he’s never been very good at self-preservation, and Jeno pulls him into a kiss so familiar Renjun thinks maybe he could call it home. He draws back, presses their foreheads together like a brand. “We’re going to live.”

Jaemin knows—Renjun _thinks_ Jaemin knows, but he’ll never be sure. It’s good that he’s never brought it up. Turning a blind eye is the best option here, the safest. Renjun’s essentially forsaken every last safety precaution in his line of work; sparing Jaemin of the backlash is the least he can do.

Six months after Amsterdam, Renjun kills an accountant in Paris. His ties to the criminal underworld precede him, a justification as good as any, but when Renjun looks down at the dead body slumped onto bloody hardwood, he can only think of the wife and child he leaves behind. It’s a discomfiting sensation, empathy.

Jeno’s in Lyon on reconnaissance, and instead of waiting for the next natural overlap, he decides the logical course of action is to shirk standard protocol for their meetings and take a train up. He shows up at Renjun’s hotel room at ten in the morning, sunglasses slipping down his nose and revealing dark circles under his eyes. “Coffee?”

“How do you know I’m done with work?” Renjun says cautiously, checking the corridor before taking him in. He looks tired, but that’s nothing new.

“You still smell like blood,” he replies, but there’s no ire to it. He won’t meet Renjun’s eyes, and in hindsight, that should’ve tipped him off. There aren’t many things in the world Jeno seems unwilling to confront head-on. “Plus, you like to do your work at night. I made an educated guess. There’s a café down the street, it’s got nice reviews.”

“Right.” Renjun can’t tear his gaze away from Jeno’s face; there’s something wrong with it, something off he’s not noticing. “Right, yeah. Let me get my things.”

Coffee is a mundane affair. Jeno gets some fancy Parisian brew and Renjun gets black tea and a strawberry pastry. He isn’t sure why—he doesn’t even really like strawberry—until Jeno’s mouth quirks up in a half-smile, and he says, “Thanks, babe.”

They get a table on the corner, with a floral patterned sun umbrella and wrought iron detailing that Renjun idly traces the lines of while waiting for Jeno to speak. By the time he does, the dregs of his tea have already gone cold. “How was work?”

Renjun narrows his eyes. “You hate hearing about my work.”

“Try me,” he says, forcing a faint smile.

So he does. He tells Jeno about work, as far back as he can remember it, every nook and cranny of every assignment and all the training he’s done besides. He tells him about the three-year-old son of the accountant he killed yesterday, about how he hadn’t been able to get out quick enough and had heard the beginnings of a mumbled argument between him and his mother while she tried to tug him away from the dead body. Despite all his bravado, Jeno’s expression inevitably darkens as he picks away at the edges of his pastry.

But, to Renjun’s surprise, he finds himself telling Jeno about things that aren’t work. Maybe it’s because Jeno’s rare bad moods seem to permeate the world around him and end up, more often than not, upsetting Renjun for no good reason. Maybe it’s because he hasn’t exchanged anything more than pleasantries with Jaemin in months. He isn’t sure why. He isn’t sure it matters anymore.

He tells Jeno about the old cat lady down the hall from his apartment, and the online classes he’s taking between assignments, and how he’s started cloud-watching. With every small shred of life he places between them, there’s a corresponding relaxation in the tenseness of Jeno’s stance, until finally, his mouth is quirked in something close to a smile. There’s flakes of pastry crust on his bottom lip, and Renjun reaches out a hand without thinking, brushes them off with his thumb.

Jeno stills under him, but doesn’t tense, and that too feels like an omen. An act of tenderness is just as damning as one of violence, and they both know this, have the knowledge seared bone-deep. It’s practically in the handbook.

He raises a hand, places it over Renjun’s wordlessly. Renjun has the sense he’s supposed to be saying something. They were having a conversation. They were doing _something._

“Renjun,” Jeno starts. His brows are slightly furrowed, but he doesn’t drop his hand. He opens his mouth to speak, and the café beside them explodes.

Time slows in crisis. Renjun goes rigid for a millisecond, then throws himself under the wrought iron table. Jeno’s loading his gun with a resigned grimace. He glances over at the knife in Renjun’s hand and nods in agreement. He has no idea what’s happening anymore. “Is this a secret agent thing?”

Jeno inclines his head towards the café. The dark circles around his eyes seem even more pronounced in the shadows. “I don’t know for sure, but I would put my money on it, yeah. There’s an, uh, _persistent_ terrorist cell we’ve been tracking.” He hesitates for a moment, then adds, “I think you should go. Backup might show up, and if they see you—’

“I _know_ ,” he says, a little too sharply, and Jeno winces. He puts his hand on Jeno’s knee. “I knew what I signed up for when we started this. I’ll see you later?”

Jeno fiddles with his gun. “I’ll text you.”

“Right.” Renjun blows a sigh out of the side of his mouth and leans forward, presses a kiss to his cheek. “Save the world for me, then.”

He thinks Jeno might glance up, but his expression’s swallowed in the chaos of the scene, of shouting and sirens and the crackle of fire and electricity. Renjun keeps his knife near him and disappears into the crowd.

That night, he flips through channels until he lands on the local news and finds himself unable to switch it off. _Electrical fire,_ a young woman with a tight bun and an implacable expression reads off of a teleprompter. _Two deaths so far, and ten injured._

Something raw and untested inside him clenches at the knowledge. The next day, he takes a roundabout route to the rendezvous point where he’s meeting Kun for a debrief. There’s something desolate about the emptiness of the café, the uneven coal-black streaks of soot marred by the impact points of debris. It feels like death, feels like the twist of a blade between oblivious ribs, but, looking at it, Renjun doesn’t feel the same sense of pleasant finality. He doesn’t feel anything.

The debrief goes well enough, and they head back to a place Renjun desperately tries to convince himself is home. He stays up until three in the morning watching cartoon reruns with his burner phone held loosely in one hand, waiting for it to vibrate. It doesn’t. 

++

Months pass. Jeno doesn’t text him, and eventually, Renjun stops hoping that he will.

He’s not sure what to make of it. Logically, there has to be an explanation—something short of his higher-ups suddenly discovering their remarkably well hidden secret affair and terminating him—or worse. There has to be an inexplicably complex issue that’s interfering with his ability to communicate with him.

 _Or,_ a small, cruel voice in his head whispers, _Or he just got tired. Figured this isn’t worth the strain on his career. Figured this isn’t what he wants. Figured_ you _aren’t what he wants._

He wants to say that it’s not the sort of thing Jeno would do, but it’s not like they really _know_ each other, anyway. The most he’s ever let slip is that he has three cats at home, and plays the guitar. What they have is a single drop in the ocean of his life, and it would be ridiculous to assume that Renjun knows Jeno, that he could ever understand him. If that kind of empathy existed, all the old fairy tales would have happy endings, and villainy wouldn’t exist, and instead of war, everyone would just hold hands and sing around the proverbial bonfire.

As it is, life goes on. In essentially every other way, things remain unchanged—he keeps killing, ignores the odd, unfamiliar ice in his chest, and moderates his self destruction as best as he can. It’s a good system, and even if Jaemin shoots him a concerned glance every now and then, at least he has the good sense not to bring it up.

(Renjun does break down, once. He gets on the database using the login of one of the administration assistants, pores over Jeno’s file.

It’s standard shit—dangerous, focused, not to be dealt with alone, and a long, long track record of interfering with previous assignments. It’s date-marked October 5th, a solid month after the explosion in Paris, and it relays his status as alive.

He’s relieved. Mostly.)

When he gets an assignment in Virginia, delivered by the traditional curl of rolled up paper, Renjun thinks for a moment that it’s all some kind of cosmic joke. The universe conspiring to ruin his life, or something near enough. He breaks protocol, barges into Taeyong’s office before burning the paper. “Is this a joke?”

He blinks at him. “What? Oh, the one in Virginia. Is that going to be a problem?”

“I _hate_ parties.”

“We know,” he says, sounding oddly amused, as if this is an old joke between them. “It’s not like you’ve made any concerted effort to hide it. This isn’t punishment, Renjun. We need someone to get the job done, and you’re free that weekend.”

Even if Taeyong hadn’t planned it in advance, Renjun has a feeling this is karma. He deserves it, God knows he deserves it hundreds of times over, but even as he leans against the refreshments table, he can’t help a stab of resentment towards whatever higher power decided _this_ was the best way to teach him humility.

It’s a political event, he thinks—nominally political, but with a strong enough dose of dilettantes and family friends that it’s increasingly clear it’s simply a gathering of rich white people in a shining, bright mansion plastered along the west shore of the Chesapeake Bay. He plucks another champagne flute off a nearby platter and downs it, waiting for it to dull the edges of his anger.

His mark’s an up and coming politician with a polished smile and an incredibly sordid past. Nothing unexpected, nothing difficult. Even the procedure is familiar, if updated, the alcove of the new poison ring on his finger substituted with botulinum toxin instead of cyanide.

It’s nothing like Vienna, not really—the layout of the ballroom is all different, the architecture oddly contradictory with sweeping, grand structures and sleek, modern appliances. There’s champagne and hors d’oeuvres and dreadful small-talk and shining suits and shining smiles, but past that, there’s nothing of note to connect them.

Renjun thinks about this while keeping an eye on his mark; smiling guilelessly, networking with older men with aquiline features and colorless skin. He thinks about that searing waltz, about the smell of bitter almonds as he pressed hands to a liquid reflection; he thinks of Vienna even as he tries his best _not_ to think of Vienna, because he’s always been self-destructive at heart and human nature, he’s found, is a stubborn, ugly thing.

Then he sees a dark silhouette framed between the far doors of a neighboring gallery, cast in shades of slate and gold in waning light. From this far away, Renjun can’t make out any features—just the slant of his body, the eerie chiaroscuro of angles held up to low light. And yet, he knows. The figure glances up at him, as if aware of his gaze, and a familiar burn rolls through him, and he _knows._

Renjun’s not drunk enough for this. He isn’t sure he’ll ever be drunk enough for this; by the time his rational brain’s caught up to everything else, he’s halfway across the ballroom. Jeno watches him come, expression utterly inscrutable, and Renjun wraps a hand into the soft fabric of his suit shirt and drags him into the gallery.

Carved, bronze plated doors swing shut behind them, filling the strangely spacious room with a resounding hum. It’s a gallery of art, sculptures mostly. Figures of marble and metal watch them silently, limbs arcing in prayer and ecstasy. Hanging plants dangle from the ceiling, and the whole room smells faintly of soil and the tang of cold metal.

Renjun’s fingers are still entangled in the collar of Jeno’s shirt, the harsh movement pulling them so close he can smell Jeno’s cologne, see the sparsest splash of color on the edge of his jaw. Recently washed off blood. Jeno holds his gaze steadily enough, but there’s a distance to him now. His eyes are dark and smooth and unreadable, as if he’s simply another one of the sculptures held up around them.

“Is that a gun or are you just happy to see me?” he asks, a crooked smile flickering to life.

“Where have you been?” Renjun asks flatly. He lets go of Jeno’s collar, ignores the way the wrinkled fabric bunches up loosely below his throat. He scrubs a hand over his eyes, unbearably angry at himself.

“Around,” says Jeno lightly. Like this is still a fucking joke, or maybe that’s all it’s ever been—a way to test the boundaries, an experiment in recklessness. Renjun isn’t sure why he’s surprised; this is what he signed up for, after all.

“I thought you were dead.”

The mask of levity stutters for a split second, giving way to something discomfited and thoughtful. But then it’s back in full force, all irreverent cruelty and faint, inexplicable amusement. It never quite reaches his eyes, but he’s talented and practiced, and it comes out convincing enough otherwise. “Well, that was your first mistake. I don’t die.”

Renjun closes his eyes, feels a caustic laugh bubble out of him. He feels strange and raw, as if his fury is a tangible thing flickering to life between them and the heat pressed against his skin is the gallery threatening to go up in flames. “Right, of course, I forgot. You don’t _die,_ because you’re, what? Superhuman? A part of some greater fairy tale that you haven’t yet deigned to let the rest of us know about, a protagonist in a sweeping story of good and evil?”

“It’s not like that,” he says, in such a small voice that Renjun opens his eyes to look at him, hands clenched and gaze set on some faraway arch of the doorway. A muscle jumps in his jaw once, and Jeno opens his mouth as if to say something more but finally shuts it.

“It’s not like what?” he throws back, stepping close enough that they’re chest to chest.

In any other context, it would be intimate. As it is, it just reminds Renjun of blood and broken noses, kisses meant to bruise. Misery flits across Jeno’s face, and he knows he’s remembering it too.

The door to the gallery creaks open, and Jeno’s expression shifts into something not unlike fear, or anger. He slides an arm around Renjun’s waist and swings him around so their positions are nearly switched. He kisses him without preamble, so intensely that for a moment, Renjun thinks of nothing else but kissing him back.

But there’s still someone else in the room—he can see the barest hint of their shoulder over Jeno’s, notes a flash of red hair. More than anything else, Renjun can sense their presence; even through the haze of desire, he can feel the prickling sensation of being watched, the steady rhythm of another pair of lungs.

Jeno wrenches him around so the flash of the other figure disappears, leans him against a marble statue of an angel with wings spread past both of them. He tightens the hand on his waist and slips another into his hair, tugging his head back to kiss down the column of his throat.

“Don’t make eye contact with her,” he says against Renjun’s skin, the stern tone of the words incongruous with the lazy way he’s threading his fingers through his hair. “Don’t even look at her. I’ve adjusted things so that—from her angle—you’re utterly unrecognizable. I’m more of an issue, but I’ll take the fall for that later.”

Jeno tugs him closer with one hand, disentangles the other from his hair so he can unbutton the collar of Renjun’s silk shirt. “Make noise, as much as you can. Remember, we want her to think we’re having crazy wanton monkey sex, not having an argument between spurned lovers.”

“I’m not your spurned lover.”

“No, we were just having a chat about the weather like normal boyfriends.” The word boyfriend makes Renjun immediately grimace and Jeno blows out a thin breath, bites into a sensitive spot on his neck. “ _Relax._ This is going to be fine.”

Renjun pulls him in by the collar, kisses him until there’s enough cover for him to feasibly slip past and whisper in his ear, “I’m guessing you have a plan. You better have a fucking plan, or I swear to God, I’ll kill you myself—”

He pushes him back against the angel statue again, pressing their bodies flush against each other again. This is the worst day of Renjun’s life. He can’t think of a single thing that could possibly make this day even worse, but he has confidence in its creativity. “Yes, I have a plan. We’re going to kiss until the lady over by the door becomes convinced you are not who you are and leaves, and then you are going to disappear.”

“Jeno,” he breathes, glaring up at him with as much intensity as he can manage which, granted, is not much. “I am _not_ leaving.”

“Yes, _you are_ ,” hisses Jeno. The rhythm of their kisses has become stilted and arrhythmic, but he hasn’t heard any movement from their voyeur, so he assumes they’re still keeping up a reasonable show.

“I have an _assignment,”_ Renjun bites out. “I can’t just show up at HQ with zero excuse and _hickeys on my neck_.”

“Don’t worry about the excuse,” he says distractedly. “I will give you an excuse. Kill your mark whenever you want—later tonight, tomorrow, next month. But not now, and _not here.”_ With an uncharacteristic desperation, he adds, “ _Please,_ Renjun.”

He doesn’t think he’s ever heard Jeno say please, not sincerely. It’s a frightening thing. Renjun exhales through his teeth, kisses him again with a harsh, bruising intensity so he can whisper against his lips, “Fine.”

Jeno shudders with something like relief and draws him close, kissing him until time blurs around them and everything tastes of blood and champagne. After another ten minutes, there’s a soft exhale of frustration from behind Jeno, and the door reluctantly opens and shuts. They kiss for a few moments more, just to be safe, and then pull apart.

Renjun tentatively brushes a hand against his lips, half-drunk on lust and still hot with unresolved anger. He glances up. “What’s next?”

Jeno cards a hand through his hair. He looks unsteady enough himself, but there’s a blade-sharp energy to him now, business-like precision defining every small movement. He nods at a door at the back of the room, half obscured by hanging stems of the aerial plants. “That leads out to the east garden. From there, it’s a roundabout walk to the parking lot, but not more than ten minutes.”

“What if someone notices me?” Now that the warm buzz of desire has partially worn off, Renjun is once again deeply aware how tenuous a plan this really is. It’s got zero fail-safes. It’s all luck and tricks and charisma, but then again, most things to do with Jeno usually are.

“They won’t,” he says firmly. “Trust me.”

Renjun swallows down a bitter laugh and a corresponding remark, but it must show on his face well enough, because Jeno’s expression twists with barely veiled misery, and he adds, “I promise you’ll get out of this safe.”

“And you?” he grins mirthlessly despite it all. At the end of the day, this is what he always comes back to. Like love is simply a bad habit he can’t kick. “Are you going to be safe?”

“I’m always safe,” Jeno says, but it’s all wrong; the cheer in his voice is saccharine and hollow, and his smile is a flimsy, bastardized thing. The words feel like a trite catchphrase, like this is a video game after all, and he’s trudging into a boss fight he doesn’t plan to win.

“If you die,” Renjun says, “I’m going to burn down your entire organization. I’m going to dismantle it from the bottom up, I’ll light the debris on fire and blow the ashes everywhere. I’ll become a dictator, I’ll kick puppies on the street, I’ll—”

“Renjun.”

He exhales. “If you die, I’ll become a villain, just to spite you. So you can’t.”

“Okay,” Jeno says softly. “I won’t.”

The fire alarm goes off when he’s halfway through navigating the winding patterns of the east garden. It’s a shrill, cutting sound that’s immediately followed by the troubled chatter and occasional shouts of guests who have very rarely experienced disaster. By the time Renjun’s safely installed in his rental car and pulling out of the driveway, the chaos has only been semi-resolved and a crowd of guests has pooled onto the front steps of the mansion.

He pauses in the gravel, examines every figure for that careless slant to his stance, but he can’t find Jeno. _I won’t,_ he repeats in Renjun’s memory, and he replays it in his head, holds onto the sound of those words until the smoke is soft enough to be oneiric.

++

It takes a month for Jeno’s next appearance to show up on file, but it finally does, marking his last known location as Manila. Renjun’s relieved enough for the anger to take a backseat at first, but eventually it warms back up to a low roar.

“What was he thinking?” He’s pacing in his apartment, directing his words to the tabby cat reclined on his sofa, balefully licking a paw. He isn’t sure why he agreed to cat-sit for his neighbor—they don’t even really know each other that well—but Sir Kitty is a welcome presence. “That plan could’ve just as easily failed, and then where would we be? Not to mention his putting himself in the line of fire, like martyrdom is anything to _admire.”_

Above it all, he’s irritated that he still knows little to nothing about what _really_ happened that night. Jeno had smoothly swept by any semblance of a proper explanation, and in hindsight, none of it quite lines up properly in light of what he knows of either of their organizations. He can’t stop thinking about Jeno’s lips on the hollow of his throat, whispering, _I’ll take the fall,_ each word a bullet of its own.

He’s tired—not with Amsterdam’s bone-deep fatigue, but with something sharper, coarser, a puerile exasperation that makes him heedless and foreign even to himself. Jeno hasn’t used the burner phone in months, but there are other, more direct ways to contact his organization. What remains of his self-preservation instincts tell him to hold out, to just _wait,_ so he decides to try his hand at black market deals _after_ Barcelona.

After cleaning up, he takes a roundabout route back to the hotel, looping around so he can catch a glimpse of the Sagrada Familia at night. Two streets down from the condominium where he slit a housewife’s throat, he realizes that he’s being followed.

In the low light of the early morning, he can’t discern silhouettes without fully turning around, so he has to rely on the faint patter of two pairs of footsteps from time to time. It’s not easy—it’s clear that they’re professionals, but so is he.

Renjun wonders briefly if he can handle both of them on so little sleep. But he’s already high on the adrenaline of the recent kill, and he’s still cross about all the smoke and mirrors of the affair in Virginia, so he slides his gun out of his waistband and clicks the safety off, turning into a nearby alleyway.

The sun is crawling sluggishly over the horizon, and in the velvet blue glow of life before dawn, the two figures that follow him in look nearly identical. Nearly. There’s a thin flash of silver catching the light, a piercing, and despite it all, Renjun feels his mouth start to spread in a smile.

He points his gun at the other figure, Jeno’s partner, and they both stiffen as they slowly inch into sight. They both have their guns pointed at him, though Jeno’s is conspicuously off-target. If he shot, it would hit a garbage can five feet off. The line of his mouth is tight with some unknown strain, but past that he’s unreadable.

“Put down the gun,” says his partner in low, calming tones. He’s an unremarkable young man with hazel eyes and a crooked nose. There’s an imperious tilt to his gaze, and it makes Renjun want to shoot him just for that.

“I don’t think I will,” he says lightly, keeping his eyes on the sliver of space between Jeno and his partner. He isn’t sure why he hasn’t just shot already—Jeno’s not going to shoot _him._ But it feels wrong, debasing somehow, to kill someone in front of him.

“I _said,_ put it down.”

Renjun moves his gun to the right, and shoots past his ear. Despite everything, the man flinches slightly, and he feels a stab of satisfaction. “I’m not going to. If you want me dead, you’re going to have to put in the work.”

He begrudgingly glances at Jeno, imploring him to do something. Reluctantly, he lowers his gun, slowly moving closer until they’re barely feet apart. “We don’t want to hurt you.”

“Don’t you?” Renjun believes that of _him._ This close, he can see the apologetic glint in his eyes, and something strange and shining below it.

“Not here,” he says. Renjun recognizes his expression belatedly as his scheming face. Jeno takes another step closer; the barrel of Renjun’s gun is pressed flush against his chest. “It’s too public; we don’t want to make a mess.”

“I don’t mind making a mess.”

“Oh, for Christ’s sake,” his partner says, and shoots.

Jeno pulls him close and shifts their position so the bullet hits him instead, burying itself in his left shoulder. He lets out a muffled _fuck_ from the pain and slumps against Renjun’s chest. Before his partner can reassess the situation and fire again, Renjun’s shot him three times in the heart. 

Renjun kneels beside Jeno’s prone body, gathering him in his arms. He rips a large swathe of fabric off of his shirt sleeve and presses it against the wound to staunch the flow of blood, wrapping it with a flat nylon cord in his bag. It’s not the classiest first-aid he’s ever given out, but his hands are shaking too badly to make use of his full kit.

“What the _fuck?”_ he hisses, cupping Jeno’s cheek with one hand. His eyes are open but hazy with pain. “Why would you do that for me?”

Jeno grunts, tries to pull himself up to his feet but it’s a losing fight, and he stumbles halfway down the alleyway with one hand gripping his shoulder. He looks down at it mournfully. “He would’ve shot you.”

“I’ve been shot before,” Renjun mutters, taking him by the uninjured arm and guiding him out of the other side of the alleyway. “Take my jacket. You can explain this to me later.”

He follows him down the street, draping the windbreaker over his shoulders. Leaning close, he whispers, “Aren’t people going to notice the gunshots?”

“I still had my silencer on,” he replies, scanning the streets regardless. The city is near deserted as it slides towards dawn, but the occasional pedestrian worries him enough. “But no, your partner was an idiot, and someone probably heard that. All the more reason for us to move quickly.”

Jeno falls silent at that, but his features are still strained faintly with agony, and Renjun’s chest clenches. _Idiot,_ he thinks, and it’s only when Jeno glances over at him in surprise that he realizes he spoke aloud. Ignoring the burn in his ears, he drags Jeno down the streets, slowing in front of a battered old apartment building and nudging him through the splintered door. 

The hallways are deserted, peeling floral wallpaper tracing decaying walls. Renjun scrounges in his bag for his key and guides them towards a room at the end of the hall.

“What is this place?” Jeno whispers, and he glares at him out of the corner of his eye.

“Safe house,” he murmurs back, slipping in and shutting the door behind them. Now that they’re alone, he drops the pretense of secrecy and leans his bag against the counter of the kitchenette. “I had a job here, a few years ago, and things got messy. I set something up in case I ever had an assignment here again and they got wind of it.”

Renjun pulls him into the adjoining bedroom, sits him down on the stripped mattress and takes a seat on the shuttered windowsill. He tugs the first-aid box out from under the bedframe, and Jeno watches his movements without speaking, as though this silence is a gentle thing, a kind of shelter.

It isn’t; he pulls out a pair of tweezers and gives Jeno a hard look. “You have five minutes to explain what the hell is going on.”

Jeno offers a choked sort of laugh, and it hisses out into a low whine of pain as Renjun cuts off his shirt and the cold, dry air of the apartment scrapes across the raw wound. “While you get the bullet out?”

“While I get the bullet out,” he affirms, straightening Jeno’s shoulder with one hand and picking at the bloody flesh with the other. “Clock’s running.”

His mouth quirks in an odd half-smile, but he obliges. Tells Renjun about how after Naples, his kills were becoming more and more noticed; he’d killed a couple of high profile socialites here and there--quick, easy things in the safety of their homes—that had set him high up on the radar of most well known surveillance organizations. Jeno, flagged down as someone who’d made contact with him before, was sent to dispatch him under the guise of a ceasefire.

“Paris?” he asks, raising his eyebrows. He picks out a few bullet fragments and places them on the folded towel beside them. The blood soaks deep into the plush fabric, diffusing through the soft fibers. “That was why you were so on edge, then.”

“Yeah,” he breathes, screwing his eyes up against the pain. “I, uh, wanted to hate you. That’s why I asked about your work, I don’t know, I just—I wanted to think of you the way I had when we had first met.”

“Like what?”

“Like you were a monster.” Renjun plucks out the last of the shrapnel and dabs gauze with alcohol. He wonders at the cold lack of surprise in him. Jeno gives a hard laugh, tense with pain. “But I couldn’t. Not anymore. And then you started talking about _cloud watching,_ and I just knew I couldn’t go through with it.”

Renjun hums. “They would’ve terminated you. They might’ve killed you.”

“Better me than you,” he says lightly, too lightly. He presses the gauze to Jeno’s shoulder and he yelps, glares at him as if the bullet wound is somehow _Renjun’s_ fault. “Jesus, that stings. I don’t know what I would’ve done if the café hadn’t blown up.”

He raises an eyebrow, and Jeno continues, “I blamed it on you, said you had it set up as a fail-safe if I betrayed you. It sounded like the sort of thing you would do, and they ate it up. But it backfired, too, made them think you were more dangerous than you really are—the sort of person who would plant a bomb in a café for shits and giggles—so when I was sent after you in Virginia, they gave me back-up.”

“That went south. You were angry, and I couldn’t explain it properly because then you actually _would_ burn down headquarters, and then Elaine walked in, and—what was I supposed to do?” Renjun swallows a petulant response and finishes cleaning the wound. “I told them you saw me and snuck out under the cover of the fire alarm. Got saddled with a partner for misconduct after making out with some random socialite instead of doing my job, but it could’ve been worse.”

“And then they tracked me to Barcelona.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be like this,” he whispers as Renjun presses gauze to the small hole and wraps his shoulder with bandages. “I’d called the police on a burner phone a few minutes before; they were supposed to show up before anyone could shoot. No one was supposed to _die.”_

“Sometimes people do,” Renjun says quietly, gentler than he expects. “Sometimes things go wrong.”

Jeno looks at him askance. “You’re not angry?”

“I’m definitely angry,” he says, tightens the bandages and knots it lightly. Jeno winces. “I’m fucking furious. I can’t believe you didn’t tell me, I can’t believe you got _shot_ for me, I can’t believe you thought _any_ of this was going to work, it’s a terrible plan—”

“I thought it was an okay plan,” Jeno says, gives a weak laugh. He wilts under the force of Renjun’s glare. “Sorry.”

“I’m not done,” he continues, leaning back. “We have limited options now. I mean, escape isn’t _impossible,_ but this complicates things. I know a few safehouses we can go, and—”

“We?” he blinks. “You’re quitting?”

Renjun folds his arms, glares at him even harder. “No, I’m just going to leave you bleeding out of your arm in a rotting apartment in Barcelona while I go back to my day job as a contract killer. I’m staying with you.”

“For how long?”

“For however long you want me around,” he snaps. “Any other stupid questions?”

“I guess not,” Jeno says, pacified. A smile tugs at the corner of his mouth. “I love you, you know.”

Renjun’s ears burn and burn and burn. “I’m gonna call a friend of mine and sort things out. Don’t strain your shoulder.” Jeno reorients himself on the mattress; Renjun watches him slowly stretch out into a supine position and pauses by the door. Keeping his voice just slightly above a whisper, he mumbles, “Love you, too,” and shuts the door behind him before he has to put up with Jeno’s response.

He presses his back to the wall, takes in the dull view of the kitchenette and digs out the burner phone he keeps for emergencies.

Jaemin picks up immediately. There’s an edge to his voice, like he’s been preparing for this for a long time. Renjun wonders if he has. “Are you okay?”

“Yeah.” He fiddles with the peeling wallpaper.

Slowly, inexorably, he asks, “Is Jeno okay?”

Renjun huffs out a quick, harsh laugh. _This was always the way it was going to end,_ he thinks. “Yeah. Kind of. He’s—he’ll be okay. He got shot in the shoulder.”

“Jesus.” There’s a beat of silence, and then he ventures, “One of ours?”

“One of his.” He’s never going to get over the melodrama of this, the way it turned out to be a perfect movie climax after all. “He, uh, took the shot for me. I was the target of the operation?”

Jaemin exhales, sharp and punched out. “Wow.”

He hums in agreement, and they lapse into a faintly uncomfortable silence. _Where do we go from here?_ Renjun blurts, “I think I’m going to quit.”

“You can’t really _quit_ in this line of work,” he says dryly.

“Yes, obviously Jeno and I are going to elope together and run triumphantly into the sunset,” Renjun snaps, nerves worn. He curls his hands into fists to stop them from trembling. “Sorry. I’ve made all the necessary preparations, in case something like this happened—well, not something like _this,_ I doubt even _I_ could’ve predicted this—but, you know. Something that required me to go on the run.

He rubs at his eyes. “And… I need your help. You don’t have to say yes, I know that helping me could easily become _very_ dangerous for you, and you’re not obligated to help me in the slightest, but… you’re the only person I trust with this.”

Jaemin’s exhale comes out oddly crackly, but there’s a contrived flippancy to his voice when he speaks. “I would’ve helped even if you hadn’t asked. What do you need from me?”

Renjun explains where to find the wooden box hidden inside his fireplace, with his extra passports, cash, and credentials. “There’s a safehouse I set up alone a few years ago in Andalusia. I don’t think anyone knows about it. I’ll meet you at the train station in Granada. The CCTV has a blindspot next to the women’s bathroom on the east side.”

“Does Jeno know about this?”

He glances through the glass panel of the worn door, eyes the heavily bandaged figure laid haphazardly across the off-white mattress. “Not everything, just the basics. I’ll tell him on the way over. He needs to rest, for now.”

Jaemin’s quiet for a moment, then he asks, “Aren’t you going to miss this? Killing?”

“Yeah,” Renjun says. He leans his head against the crook of the doorjamb. “Of course I’m going to miss it. But there are other things I think I need, other things I… want.”

“Sex?” he suggests.

“Companionship,” Renjun bites out.

“Close enough,” he says, and if he’s up to teasing him, maybe Renjun hasn’t entirely incinerated their friendship.

“You weren’t surprised.”

“What?”

Renjun shifts against the mildewed wall. “When I told you I was quitting. You didn’t sound surprised at all. Why?”

“You’re a good killer,” Jaemin says, a wistful, strained note in his voice. “But it’s not all you are, and it’s certainly not what you want to be. It was only a matter of time until you realized that yourself.”

The cold tightness in his chest eases slightly, a vise grip he’d never thought to fully acknowledge.

“Don’t be a stranger,” he says finally. “I know that things will be difficult, but…”

“I won’t,” Jaemin assures him. Renjun can hear the laugh in his voice when he next speaks. “Now go comfort your boy toy. Have fun planning your honeymoon.”

The dial tone stretches out, and Renjun wants to reach after it, hold this moment in his hands like it’s something sacred instead of silence in a gutted home. He shuts his eyes, takes a deep breath to steel himself against a future that he knows is going to fight him every step of the way. _But maybe that’s okay,_ he thinks. _Maybe it’s okay to fight for what you love._

He slips his phone back in his pocket and returns, sitting on the edge of his mattress. Jeno’s eyes are shut, and his body is still tense with pain, but there’s a faint smile on his face. “I can hear you overthinking things.”

Renjun scrubs a hand over his face. “This… this isn’t going to be an easy life, Jeno. It’s not going to be fun; constantly looking over our shoulders, changing our identities twice a year, shooting to kill when we have to. It’s easier— _safer—_ to handle alone, and I would understand if you wanted me to—”

Jeno takes his hand from where it’s flat against his face, and tugs it down to rest on his chest. He’s warm, but Renjun can only think of how slick his skin felt with blood running down it. “I want you around. I want you to stay. Please.”

“Oh,” he says faintly. “Okay.”

“I would kiss you now, but it hurts too much to move,” he says, with theatric melancholy.

Renjun reaches around him and tosses a sunken pillow at his face. Jeno just grins through it all, uses his uninjured hand to pull it away. His expression turns oddly thoughtful, and Renjun braces for the worst. “Renjun.”

“Yeah?”

“Where are we going?”

Renjun hums and lays down across his legs. “Wherever we don’t get killed. Lisbon, for now, though I’m sure that’ll change quickly. Is that a problem?”

Jeno smiles, so soft it looks strange against his features, and leans down, kisses him on the mouth once. “No, it’s perfect. As long as you’re with me.”

And, in any other circumstance, Renjun would take the time to chide him against the strain in his shoulder, blush and swear and ignore the affection entirely. As it is, he just cups Jeno’s face and pulls him closer.

**Author's Note:**

> WHEW. well i really hope u enjoyed this!!! kudos and comment if u wanna it would SERIOUSLY make my day :") ALSO MG EPILOGUE IS COMING I PROMISE KEEP AN EYE OUT


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